"Dover Beach" is a short lyric poem by the English poet Matthew Arnold.[1] It was first published in 1867 in the collection New Poems, but surviving notes indicate its composition may have begun as early as 1849. The most likely date is 1851.[2]

The title, locale and subject of the poem's descriptive opening lines is the shore of the English ferry port of Dover, Kent, facing Calais, France, at the Strait of Dover, the narrowest part (21 miles) of the English Channel, where Arnold honeymooned in 1851.[2]

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In Stefan Collini's opinion, "Dover Beach" is a difficult poem to analyse, and some of its passages and metaphors have become so well known that they are hard to see with "fresh eyes".[3] Arnold begins with a naturalistic and detailed nightscape of the beach at Dover in which auditory imagery plays a significant role ("Listen! you hear the grating roar").[4] The beach, however, is bare, with only a hint of humanity in a light that "gleams and is gone".[5] Reflecting the traditional notion that the poem was written during Arnold's honeymoon (see composition section), one critic notes that "the speaker might be talking to his bride".[6]

The sea is calm to-night.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits; —on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

Arnold looks at two aspects of this scene, its soundscape (in the first and second stanzas) and the retreating action of the tide (in the third stanza). He hears the sound of the sea as "the eternal note of sadness". Sophocles, a 5th-century BC Greek playwright who wrote tragedies on fate and the will of the gods, also heard this sound as he stood upon the shore of the Aegean Sea.[7][8] Critics differ widely on how to interpret this image of the Greek classical age. One sees a difference between Sophocles interpreting the "note of sadness" humanistically, while Arnold in the industrial nineteenth century hears in this sound the retreat of religion and faith.[9] A more recent critic connects the two as artists, Sophocles the tragedian, Arnold the lyric poet, each attempting to transform this note of sadness into "a higher order of experience".[10]

Having examined the soundscape, Arnold turns to the action of the tide itself and sees in its retreat a metaphor for the loss of faith in the modern age,[13] once again expressed in an auditory image ("But now I only hear / Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar"). This fourth stanza begins with an image not of sadness, but of "joyous fulness" similar in beauty to the image with which the poem opens.[14]

The final stanza begins with an appeal to love, then moves on to the famous ending metaphor. Critics have varied in their interpretation of the first two lines; one calls them a "perfunctory gesture ... swallowed up by the poem's powerfully dark picture",[16] while another sees in them "a stand against a world of broken faith".[17] Midway between these is one of Arnold's biographers, who describes being "true / To one another" as "a precarious notion" in a world that has become "a maze of confusion".[18]

The metaphor with which the poem ends is most likely an allusion to a passage in Thucydides's account of the Peloponnesian War (Book 7, 44). He describes an ancient battle that occurred on a similar beach during the Athenian invasion of Sicily. The battle took place at night; the attacking army became disoriented while fighting in the darkness and many of their soldiers inadvertently killed each other.[19] This final image has also been variously interpreted by the critics. Culler calls the "darkling plain" Arnold's "central statement" of the human condition.[20] Pratt sees the final line as "only metaphor" and thus susceptible to the "uncertainty" of poetic language.[21]

"The poem's discourse", Honan tells us, "shifts literally and symbolically from the present, to Sophocles on the Aegean, from Medieval Europe back to the present—and the auditory and visual images are dramatic and mimetic and didactic. Exploring the dark terror that lies beneath his happiness in love, the speaker resolves to love—and exigencies of history and the nexus between lovers are the poem's real issues. That lovers may be 'true / To one another' is a precarious notion: love in the modern city momentarily gives peace, but nothing else in a post-medieval society reflects or confirms the faithfulness of lovers. Devoid of love and light the world is a maze of confusion left by 'retreating' faith."[24]

Critics have questioned the unity of the poem, noting that the sea of the opening stanza does not appear in the final stanza, while the "darkling plain" of the final line is not apparent in the opening.[25] Various solutions to this problem have been proffered. One critic saw the "darkling plain" with which the poem ends as comparable to the "naked shingles of the world".[26] "Shingles" here means flat beach cobbles, characteristic of some wave-swept coasts. Another found the poem "emotionally convincing" even if its logic may be questionable.[27] The same critic notes that "the poem upends our expectations of metaphor" and sees in this the central power of the poem.[28] The poem's historicism creates another complicating dynamic. Beginning in the present it shifts to the classical age of Greece, then (with its concerns for the sea of faith) it turns to Medieval Europe, before finally returning to the present.[24] The form of the poem itself has drawn considerable comment. Critics have noted the careful diction in the opening description,[29] the overall, spell-binding rhythm and cadence of the poem[30] and its dramatic character.[31] One commentator sees the strophe-antistrophe of the ode at work in the poem, with an ending that contains something of the "cata-strophe" of tragedy.[32] Finally, one critic sees the complexity of the poem's structure resulting in "the first major 'free-verse' poem in the language".[33]

According to Tinker and Lowry, "a draft of the first twenty-eight lines of the poem" was written in pencil "on the back of a folded sheet of paper containing notes on the career of Empedocles".[34] Allott concludes that the notes are probably from around 1849–50.[35] "Empedocles on Etna", again according to Allott, was probably written 1849–52; the notes on Empedocles are likely to be contemporary with the writing of that poem.[36]

The final line of this draft is:

And naked shingles of the world. Ah love &c

Tinker and Lowry conclude that this "seem[s] to indicate that the last nine lines of the poem as we know it were already in existence when the portion regarding the ebb and flow of the sea at Dover was composed." This would make the manuscript "a prelude to the concluding paragraph" of the poem in which "there is no reference to the sea or tides".[37]

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help from pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Arnold's visits to Dover may also provide some clue to the date of composition. Allott has Arnold in Dover in June 1851 and again in October of that year "on his return from his delayed continental honeymoon". To critics who conclude that ll. 1–28 were written at Dover and ll. 29–37 "were rescued from some discarded poem" Allott suggests the contrary, i.e., that the final lines "were written at Dover in late June," while "ll. 29–37 were written in London shortly afterwards".[29]

The anonymous figure to whom Arnold addresses his poem becomes the subject of Hecht's poem. In Hecht's poem she "caught the bitter allusion to the sea", imagined "what his whiskers would feel like / On the back of her neck", and felt sad as she looked out across the channel. "And then she got really angry" at the thought that she had become "a sort of mournful cosmic last resort". After which she says "one or two unprintable things".

Kenneth and Miriam Allott, referring to "Dover Bitch" as "an irreverent jeu d'esprit", nonetheless see, particularly in the line "a sort of mournful cosmic last resort", an extension of the original poem's main theme.[40]

"Dover Beach" has been mentioned in a number of novels, plays, poems, and films:

In Fahrenheit 451 (1951), author Ray Bradbury has his protagonistGuy Montag read part of "Dover Beach" to his wife Mildred and her friends to show them what literature is about and why books should not be burnt. One of Mildred's friends cries over the poetry while the rest of it complain over how filthy it is and how Montag is nasty.

Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22 (1961) alludes to the poem in the chapter "Havermyer": "the open-air movie theater in which—for the daily amusement of the dying—ignorant armies clashed by night on a collapsible screen."

In Charles M. Fair's "The Dying Self", he speaks of "the coming of this unhappy epoch, in which men are a danger to themselves roughly in proportion to their own triviality, announced in the Victorian Age" and exemplified by "the only first-rate poem Arnold ever wrote: 'Dover Beach'."

Ian McEwan quotes part of the poem in his novel Saturday (2005), where the effects of its beauty and language are so strong and impressive that it moves a brutal criminal to tears and remorse. He also seems to have borrowed the main setting of his novella On Chesil Beach (2005) from Dover Beach, additionally playing with the fact that Arnold's poem was composed on his honeymoon (see above).

Sam Wharton quotes the final stanza in his Jonathan Hare novel 'Ignorant Armies' set in 1954, and one of his characters uses it as a commentary on the failure of senior people to maintain appropriate standards of conduct.

In the musical Cabaret (1966), the American aspiring novelist Cliff Bradshaw recites parts of the poem to the singer Sally Bowles because being English she wants to hear proper English after having been in Berlin for some time.

The Sea of Faith movement is so called as the name is taken from this poem, as the poet expresses regret that belief in a supernatural world is slowly slipping away; the "sea of faith" is withdrawing like the ebbing tide.

^Rosenblatt, Roger (14 January 1985). "Where Is Our Dover Beach?". Time article. Retrieved 2 August 2007. a brief poem that eventually would be remembered by many more people than would remember the Great Exhibition, indeed would become the most anthologized poem in English

^Tinker and Lowry, 1965, pg. 176–178. Tinker and Lowery attempt to discover a specific reference to Sophocles, suggesting passages from Antigone, The Women of Trachis, Oedipus at Colonus, and Philoctetes. But they add that "the Greek author has reference only to the successive blows of Fate which fall upon a particular family which has been devoted to destruction by the gods. The plight described metaphorically by the English poet is conceived to have fallen upon the whole human race."

^Allott, 1965, pg. 241. Though Allott concludes that "no passage in the plays [of Sophocles] is strictly applicable" to the passage in "Dover Beach," she feels that the passage from the Trachiniae (The Women of Trachis) comes closest.

^Allott, 1965, pg. 241. compare to ll. 80–82 of his "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse" which appears to have been written at about the same time. For probable date of composition of "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse", see Allott, 1965, pg 285.

^The "distant northern sea" is the English Channel which separates England from continental Europe and is the body of water that forms Dover beach.

^Culler, 1966, pg. 40. Culler describes this as a "lovely, feminine, protective image of the Sea," while Pratt sees not the beauty of the metaphor but its awkwardness and obscurity. (Pratt, 2000, pg. 82)

^Honan, 1981, pg. 234. Honan sees the "vast edges drear" as a possible memory of Wastwater in the Lake District, which Honan describes as "mountainous grey 'scree' running into translucent depths of water."

^Honan, 1981, pg. 235. "That lovers may be 'true / To one another' is a precarious notion: love in the modern city momentarily gives peace, but nothing else in a postmedieval society reflects or confirms the faithfulness of lovers. Devoid of love and light the world is a maze of confusion left by 'retreating' faith."

^Tinker and Lowry, 1965, pg. 175. "Here are to be found the details used by Arnold: a night-attack, fought upon a plain at the top of a cliff, in the moonlight, so that the soldiers could not distinguish clearly between friend and foe, with the resulting flight of certain Athenian troops, and various 'alarms,' watchwords, and battle-cries shouted aloud to the increasing confusion of all."

^Tinker and Lowry, 1965, pg. 175. Tinker and Lowry point out that "there is evidence that the passage about the 'night-battle' was familiar coin among Rugbeians" at the time Arnold attended Rugby and studied there under his father Dr. Thomas Arnold whose keen interest in Thucydides had a distinct impact on his students.

The text of the poem is as in Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold, edited by Dwight Culler, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1961; ISBN 0-395-05152-5 and Matthew Arnold's Poems ed. Kenneth Allott (pub. J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1965). The editors of this page have opted for the elided spellings on several words ("blanch'd," "furl'd") consistent with these texts.